Francis greeted the faithful (and the shutterbugs) in St. Peter’s Square last year.

By Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images.

Two summers ago my friend Agustín, an Argentinean graduate student on pilgrimage in Rome, filed into the papal-audience hall near St. Peter’s Basilica for a group photograph with Pope Francis. The pilgrims, a hundred in all, were put in four rows; those in the front row would meet the Pope. Then Francis strode in, smiling broadly. Scrapping protocol, he insisted on greeting all the pilgrims, one by one, the way Agustín had seen him do back when he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. Finally, Agustín’s turn came. “Buenos días,” Francis said, looking him in the eye, and Agustín explained that he was about to get married. “Congratulations,” said the Pope, “and look, if some dishes fly in your house, don’t worry about it.”

“And I said to myself, What? The Pope?,” Agustín recalls. Instead of a papal blessing, here was some man-to-man advice—the Pope, of all people, telling him not to worry if there was some everyday strife in his marriage.

Unexpected, and yet utterly in character for the man we have come to know simply as Francis—the frank and unaffected Jesuit who has become one of the most famous and most beloved people on the planet.

In the months after his March 2013 election, following the sudden resignation of Benedict XVI, he was regarded as a surprising Pope: the Pope who refused to move into the 16th-century Apostolic Palace, had his old black shoes replaced by the cobbler instead of buying fancy new papal slippers, and opened his door to three homeless men and a dog named Marley (after Bob Marley). In his second year he was thought to be a revolutionary Pope—a change agent bent on re-starting long-stifled conversations on contraception, divorce and re-marriage, and sexual orientation: as the Pope of “Who am I to judge?”

Now he is just the Pope, and he is so at ease in his white cloak that it seems he was meant to be Pope all along. Now he has gotten many of us wondering what might have been if he—who was said to be second in the balloting—had been elected after John Paul II’s death, in 2005, instead of Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict. Now, making sense of Francis isn’t a matter of figuring out what he thinks or whether he is for real. It’s a matter of seeing him for what he is.

A young Pope-to-be (standing) with brother Oscar Bergoglio at their First Communion, in Argentina, in the 1940s.

From AFP/Bergoglio Family.

And what is he? He is a free man, that’s what he is. Somehow he has stayed true to himself and to the core Catholic message and has kept free of the pomp of the papacy, the crush of celebrity, and the expectations of the global Church. “He doesn’t ‘play’ the Pope,” says Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. “He is who he is.” He’ll ride in the Popemobile with the protective glass down, no matter the security risk. He’ll establish a shelter for homeless people near St. Peter’s Square. He won’t stop speaking off the cuff and he won’t insist that all the cardinals agree about everything. With 1.2 billion members, the Church is a tumultuous household, and he isn’t going to worry about a few flying dishes.

This month, Francis comes to North America. He will make an overnight stop in Cuba before a six-day trip to Washington (where he will meet with President Obama and address a joint session of Congress), New York (where he will address the United Nations and visit Ground Zero), and Philadelphia (where a papal Mass is expected to draw a million or more faithful). The visit will be his first to this country in his life, and it will take place as he faces unruly opposition from staunchly conservative cardinals and their powerful local backers on a range of Church-wide initiatives: overhaul of the long-corrupt Vatican Bank; a synod of bishops on the Church’s approach to family matters (among them, sexual matters); and calls for concerted action on climate change and “sustainable” economics.

Francis gets six or seven significant interview requests a day, the head of the Holy See Press Office says wearily—or more than 2,000 a year. But he rarely grants interviews, and then on impulse (to some Belgian Catholic students here, to the in-flight traveling press corps there). In fact, a request for a formal Vanity Fair portrait session elicits a message of spontaneous regret conveyed by a close associate: “His answer was that ‘due to his neurosis’ (and here he laughed) he is ‘allergic’ to these kinds of things” and so must decline. “He’s one for action shots, not portraits,” his confidant Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest, tells me, showing me the home screen on his iPhone: Francis drinking his favorite tea (maté, from Argentina) through a silver straw.

In Rome not long ago, I saw Francis from a half-dozen different vantage points—saw him from as close up as you can get. I also met with some of the people who know him best and work with him most directly—to get a sense of the man in full and to learn how he stays free.

THE POPE’S B&B

On Sundays, pilgrims gather in the vast ovoid piazza in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, and at noon the Pope appears in an open window of the Apostolic Palace and leads them in an ancient rite of prayer called the Angelus. So it has gone for hundreds of Sundays since Pope John XXIII first led the prayer from the window, in the early 60s. But with Francis the weekly Angelus—like so many other things—is different. Francis is the first Pope in 110 years who hasn’t lived in the palace, and he has shaken off many monarchical trappings. Up in that window, he isn’t a ruler condescending to look down on his subjects. The window isn’t a portal to the divine; it’s just an ornate window in a city full of them.

This Sunday, after several days of rain, the sun is out, and close to 100,000 people are in the piazza—more than twice as many as typically came under Benedict XVI. Some Romans roll mountain bikes over the rough stones. Tour groups cluster beneath their pennants. Street vendors push this year’s souvenir: the selfie stick.

Francis comes to the window and waves, and we see him. Sure, we’re seeing the Pope, on high, an icon in extremest white. But in the mind’s eye we also see the ordinary pastor who embraced a man with boils in St. Peter’s Square; who put on a clown nose without worrying that it might diminish the dignity of the papal office. In spirit, Francis isn’t up there in the palace. He is down in the square with everybody else.

In July, Francis arrived for Mass in Ecuador.

By Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters/Landov.

His decision not to live in the palace is still the most telling thing he has done. He said the decision was simple: “Inside myself I distinctly heard a ‘no.’ ” But the symbolism was and is powerful. He is the Pope, but he’s living at street level, in a residence akin to an Extended Stay Vaticano.

He’s living the way he was living the week the other cardinals elected him. That week, he had Room 207 in the Vatican guesthouse, called the Casa Santa Marta, where all of the cardinal-electors were sequestered during the conclave—and kept from distractions, worldly communications, and press leaks. Cardinal Walter Kasper, a prominent German theologian, had a room across the hall. Kasper, who ran a crucial Vatican office under both John Paul II and Benedict, was the rare cardinal who dared to speak out frankly against the harshness of their approach. He is 82 now, but the features that earned him the nickname Kasper the Friendly Cardinal are still there: eyes bright behind rimless glasses, and a ready smile.

“My book Mercy had just come out in Spanish translation,” he tells me one afternoon at his apartment off of St. Peter’s, “and it had reached me a few days before—three copies. So when I greeted Cardinal Bergoglio, I said, ‘Here, would you like to see this?’ And he looked at it and said, ‘Mercy—that’s the name of our God.’ Apparently he then read it during the conclave.”

Sure enough, at the Angelus one Sunday shortly after he was elected, Francis told the crowd about the book and the “clever theologian” who had written it. “But don’t think I am promoting my cardinals’ books! Not at all!” he said, in Italian, and went on: “Cardinal Kasper said that feeling mercy changes everything…. A little mercy makes the world less cold and more just.”

Mercy is the theme of the Francis era. Francis even came up with a verb for it: misericordiando, or mercy-ing. Where his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI saw the Church as the bulwark of a “culture of life”—set squarely against a “culture of death”—Francis sees the Church as the voice and the face of mercy. The difference is profound. “It’s as if what’s happening is a sex change,” one monsignor said.

“There’s no one who isn’t in need of mercy, and that’s why people are touched by Francis’s words,” Kasper tells me. But Catholic traditionalists think Francis’s stress on mercy is all wrong. They see mercy as a stalking horse for relativism. For instance, if you move an inch on the definition of marriage, they say, you’ll soon be all the way down the slippery slope to polymorphous perversity. They see Francis as so dangerously prone to relativism that he risks selling out the papacy, and the Catholic magisterium, for the sake of a soggy, Berkeley-style tolerance. (“Hey, man, like, who am I to judge?”) They see Kasper as a fallen angel speaking sotto voce in the Pope’s ear.

Kasper meets with Francis every few weeks, and their conversations are casual and straight to the point. “It was once a rule that when you went to see the Pope you had to be vested up in your cassock and sash,” he recalls. “It’s more normal now. He picks up the phone and asks, ‘Please, can you come over?,’ and then he says, ‘Please, no cassock—come as a clergyman.’ ” So Kasper walks across the square, cuts behind the basilica to the Casa Santa Marta, and joins the Pope in the sitting room of Suite 201, where Francis now lives. They talk about many things, such as what they saw and heard of marriage and divorce when they were bishops back home—when they were shepherds who smelled of the sheep, as Francis likes to put it.

FRANCIS WITH HIS FLOCK

A blue Ford Focus pulls up in front of a low, plain church an hour’s drive east of Rome. Out steps the Pope, all in white, on a pastoral visit: Sunday on the Outskirts with Francis. He goes directly to the barricades. A couple of hundred people are there, a mix of native Italians and immigrants from three continents, many of them children and teenagers in jeans and hoodies. Cameras and phones are out, and Francis leans into one selfie after another. Here he is out in the open, plump but light of step and plainly glad to be walking.

Tor Bella Monaca, on Rome’s periferia, is one of the poorest areas in the city: a zone of unemployment, drugs, and petty crime. Battered housing projects rise to rival the mountains on the horizon.

So it is Francis’s kind of place. When he was an archbishop he spent as much time at outlying churches like this one as in the cathedral. “In Buenos Aires, I was a rover. I moved between parishes,” Francis has said. All that roving back then made him the Pope he is now: at once shy, streetwise, and camera-friendly.

On this Sunday, Francis celebrates evening Mass at Santa Maria Madre del Redentore, an angular modern church in Tor Bella Monaca. With every pew of the church full, the Mass is shown on TV to an overflow crowd in the church basement, like a pay-per-view boxing match. On the flat-screens, Francis, now wearing purple liturgical vestments, looks like a typical priest of Italian heritage: the bulk, the wire-rim glasses, the five-o’clock shadow. He gives the homily, whose theme—no surprise—is mercy: “Misericordia … misericordia … ” The blue Ford Focus is parked in the basement for his return to Rome, as plain as a rental car at the airport. The white papal garb is in the trunk.

Monday morning he is at his desk, reading, writing—and talking on the phone. Up at four A.M. to pray—after making his bed—he is known to call people as early as six. A woman who was raped in Argentina; a young man whose brother was killed in a car crash; a woman who had married a divorced man and wished for them both to receive Communion: these are the people he calls. He telephones the founder of the Roman daily La Repubblica, Eugenio Scalfari, an avowed atheist, and sets up a meeting, marking it in a pocket appointment book. (“You asked me for a meeting, and I want to do that. Let’s fix a date…. Wednesday I can’t. Maybe Monday? Is that O.K. for you?”)

He also makes time for a friend of many years, Abraham Skorka, the rector of a rabbinical seminary in Buenos Aires, with whom he published a book-length conversation in 2010. Skorka tells of the time the Pope recorded a message for the staff of the old-folks’ home in Buenos Aires where Skorka’s mother and mother-in-law live and thanked them all for their efforts. Another time, says Skorka, Francis called and spoke to the rabbi’s wife, Silvia, a physical therapist. Said the Pope, “I’ve been having pains in my lumbar, so I got a physical therapist—who’s making me feel much better!”

On Francis’s desk is a well-worn breviary (a prayer book) with a letter his grandmother sent to him on the occasion of his ordination, in 1969, folded into it. His black leather satchel is nearby. Traveling, in 2013, Francis carried the bag himself, holding it in his left hand while he shook the hands of foreign dignitaries with his right, and when this caught the attention of some reporters, he scoffed: “It wasn’t the key for the atom bomb [in there]! There was a razor, a breviary, an appointment book, a book to read…. I have always taken a bag with me when travelling—it’s normal…. We must get used to being normal.”

Shortly after his election he named a group of eight cardinal advisers from around the world, reversing centuries of precedent that the Pope, as Christ’s vicar on earth, acts alone—and creating a model for a more collegial approach to Church governance. He has likened the “group of eight” to a working group, and their meetings—several times a year—are held in the guesthouse conference room rather than an august Vatican chamber. The point is clear: those cardinals aren’t princes of the Church; they’re heads of households—a Kitchen Cabinet.

At his desk—a small one in the guesthouse, a larger one in the palace—Francis makes key decisions about the life of the Church. He streamlines the org chart of the Curia, the Vatican’s clotted bureaucracy. He sets in motion a diplomatic opening to the Palestinian Authority. He helps end a half-century standoff between the U.S. and Cuba. He establishes a Vatican tribunal on priestly sexual abuse, finally giving teeth to papal promises that the Church will call negligent bishops to account. He issues an encyclical letter on the climate challenge, sharpening the argument that the human community has a religious obligation to care for the earth. “What we’re seeing in Francis is a fearless attitude toward change,” says Kenneth Hackett, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

TRIBUNALS AND TWEETS

What about e-mail and Twitter? “He says, ‘I’m a dinosaur—I don’t know how a computer works,’ ” says Antonio Spadaro, the Italian Jesuit, who published a much-talked-about conversation with Francis in 2013. The conversation—dubbed the “extemporaneous encyclical”—is the clearest account of who Francis is and how he sees things. Spadaro, also a contributor to Wired in Italy, savors the paradox that this gadget-averse Pope has become a social-media phenomenon. “He doesn’t have a tablet. He doesn’t use a mobile—he refused to carry one when he was in Buenos Aires. But he instinctively grasps that if the Church is going to meet people where they are—and one of the places where people are in our time is in the digital space—then you have to go there.” So he goes there: through the papal Twitter feed, @pontifex, started under Benedict, which now has more than 21 million followers in nine languages; through a Google Hangout he did with young people; and through all those selfies in St. Peter’s Square.

One of the paradoxes of this Pope is that he has set in motion a decentralizing of authority in the Church but insists on being involved in most of the important decisions personally, rather than delegating. And yet the image of Francis as a “C.E.O.” who practices “disruptive innovation” from his desk (as Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen would have it) seems grotesquely inaccurate. “It’s a pretty small desk, smaller than mine,” Father Spadaro says, “and, in truth, the desk is not the place of discernment for Francis. The chapel is.”

Discernment is the Jesuit practice of choosing a course of action: it involves listening, waiting, seeking indications of what God might want in the particulars of a situation, and then identifying a way forward. At his desk, Francis considers the matter at hand. Then he goes to the chapel to pray on it.

ONE-ON-ONE

Meanwhile, everybody wants a piece of him, and the best place to get a piece is at the Wednesday general audience. The Pope sits on a platform underneath a slanted canopy in St. Peter’s Square; folding chairs are set up in a U to the sides and rear, with the basilica behind. He clambers down from the platform to greet people in wheelchairs. He is conveyed through the crowd by the Popemobile. Then, on foot again, he works his way around the U, greeting the people—about 150 in all—who have been fortunate enough to get seats in the front row. There is no single or guaranteed way to obtain such a seat—as with so much at the Vatican, the path to preferment may involve behind-the-scenes connections, a functionary’s compassionate heart, or an actual ticket combined with simple good luck.

One Wednesday a year into Francis’s pontificate I was at the audience with a photographer who covers the Vatican. Through a telephoto lens he sighted a V.I.P.: Harvey Weinstein, in the front row, there with a group from his company’s film Philomena in the run-up to the Oscars. A few Wednesdays later Russell Crowe was there, prior to the release of Noah. Next came Angelina Jolie, who, after a screening of Unbroken for a small group of people at the Vatican, was granted a private audience with Francis.

This Wednesday, I have been given a front-row seat for the general audience. Early in the morning I pass through a gate near the Vatican Museums and join a group of Argentineans in the warren of buildings behind St. Peter’s. Francis’s Argentinean aide climbs up on a balustrade and welcomes us, working the crowd expertly, like a warm-up act. Then he leads us through the Apostolic Palace and to our seats in the square. By 10:30, Francis is moving along the U on the opposite side. Closer to us now, he goes from person to person: some military officers, who give him a ribboned medal; a row of newly married couples in nuptial finery.

And then he is coming along the front row. He’s the man we all know from photographs, but a little older and a little wider. He’s speaking Spanish to the woman to my left. He’s right in front of me. He’s taking my hand in his hand and clasping it in something between a handshake and a blessing. I put my other hand over his. I look him in the eye. We see eye to eye for a moment, Francis and I, and I see what people see in him: the people’s Pope, who gives of himself by being himself, by looking the whole world in the eye. We speak a few sentences in English and Italian, about la chiesa in uscita—the Church venturing into the world. He grips my hand briskly, three times, as if to indicate at once that he has understood me and that the moment is over.

What is such a moment worth? For Inés San Martín, such a moment meant new life. An Argentinean, raised a devout Catholic, fluent in English as well as Spanish, she struggled to find a job after graduate school. “They told me I was too Catholic,” she explains. An admirer of Pope Benedict’s, she signed up to volunteer at the Church’s World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, which Benedict planned to attend, and when Francis succeeded Benedict, she worked from seven A.M. to midnight at the military base that was the media center for the event. Francis went to Rio and wowed the crowd of three million. And then it was over, and Francis was leaving by helicopter from the base—but not yet. “One of the security guys had seen me come and go after everybody else,” San Martín tells me. “We were told to stay on lockdown in our offices, and the security guy says, ‘No, no. This is bullshit. You are going to meet the Pope.’

“I walk out onto the tarmac, where the helicopter is. There in a line are all the generals. There in another line are all the cardinals. And there in the middle is the Pope. The rotors are chopping. I have to shout. I shout to Francis, ‘I want to hug you.’ ” Francis shouts back, “Come and get it.” They hug. She tells him she is struggling in her personal life. He tells her to pray on it.

Now she lives in Rome and works as a correspondent for Crux, *The Boston Globe’*s Catholic-themed Web site, filing story after story about Pope Francis.

PADRE MARIO, GRIEF COUNSELOR

‘We go to the Santa Marta every few months, I’d say: sometimes for a meal, sometimes for coffee; once for half a day,” an unassuming woman named Emiliana Palmer tells me. “What he has done for us: it’s incredible.”

The week I am in Rome, Palmer is there to meet with the man who has accompanied her in a dark time. Twenty years ago, as an Italian living in South Africa, she met Tony Palmer, a young evangelical Christian, and they got married. Raised a Catholic, she returned to her faith; he became an Anglican priest and then a bishop but made their “mixed” marriage a touchstone in his efforts to transcend the divisions between churches. On mission duty in Buenos Aires, he met Cardinal Bergoglio, and they struck up a friendship so strong that Palmer came to see himself as a “spiritual son” of “Padre Mario.” When Bergoglio was elected Pope, Palmer became one of Francis’s regular visitors in Rome. On one visit, he asked if Francis would offer a papal greeting to an upcoming conference of evangelical leaders. “Do you have a mobile phone?,” Francis asked him. Palmer took his phone out of his pocket and held it steady as Francis began to speak: “Excuse me … but I will speak no Italian, no English, but heartfully. It’s a language simpler and more authentic, and this language of the heart has a special grammar.” Put up on YouTube, the phone video went viral, and no wonder: it is seven minutes of Francis speaking freely. He is sitting in an armchair in a big room; all in white, jowly, with bags under his eyes. He speaks of the emerging unity among believers long divided. He quotes the great Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni to the effect that God doesn’t start miracles without finishing them.

A red-nosed Pope and Italian newlyweds who volunteer at a children's charity, 2013.

Six months later, Tony Palmer, riding a motorcycle, was in a head-on collision with a fast car. Emiliana raced to the hospital, where doctors worked for 10 hours trying to save her husband’s life. A call came to her mobile from a private number at the Vatican. It was Francis. “He said, ‘I am here for you and for the children. If there’s anything you need, let me know,’ ” she recalls. “Just like a father or grandfather.”

Tony Palmer died, and in the weeks afterward, overwhelmed by loss and sorrow, Emiliana and their two children met the Pope for the first time. They still meet regularly: he is their personal grief counselor. “We reminisce about Tony. He tells the jokes Tony told him. He talks about himself too,” Emiliana says. Sure, it’s an instance of a priest doing what a priest ought to do—but more than that, it’s Francis being himself. “He’s a father but also a brother and a friend all in one,” Emiliana explains. “We are learning how to walk in this pain, and he is walking with us.”

A FIRST (AND LAST?) VISIT

The logistics of the Pope’s U.S. trip—three cities in six days—will put his spontaneity and affability to the test, and it’s no sure thing it will all go smoothly. Francis will be bringing the message of mercy straight to America’s many wealthy, well-organized, and bellicose Catholic traditionalists. Officially, everybody loves Francis, and the traditionalists love the way “the Francis effect” has restored some of the bona fides the Church lost as a result of the scandal and cover-up of the priestly sexual abuse of children. But most of the nearly 300 active U.S. bishops—empowered under John Paul and Benedict—dismiss even the suggestion that Francis could bring about a change in the Church’s approach toward what commentators call the “pelvic issues.” It’s a strange situation: many bishops will try to use the papal visit to keep the Pope in line, rather than the other way around.

Even if the traditionalists wind up standing with Francis, his confidant Father Spadaro worries that the Pope’s limited English will mean that his message won’t come across as clearly as it has in Rome and Latin America. “Last year,” Spadaro says, recalling a homily Francis gave in Italian to the faithful at St. Peter’s, “he told them, ‘You have to eat the world.’ At least, that is how it was rendered in the official English translation. ‘Have an appetite for life’ is the sense of what he told them.” Taking nothing for granted, the Vatican has invited Oprah Winfrey, Matt Damon, Ari Emanuel, and other American masters of mass communication to go to Rome later this fall and help Francis and the Church sharpen the presentation of the Catholic message in film and in television.

The frenzy of greeting and touching and photographing, and the controversies over sexual matters and wealth and poverty, may make it hard to see the full significance of Francis’s visit. The significance is this: no matter what he does here, he comes not just as a pilgrim but as a native son—because, unlike any of his predecessors, he is one of us. An Argentinean son of Italian immigrants, he is the first Pope from the New World, and his first trip to the United States will also be the first visit to this country by a Pope of the Americas. It will be our chance to see how much his virtues are akin to those we associate with the New World: informality, plainspokenness, an indifference to rank and title, a confidence about the future, an emphasis on freedom as both a social value and a way of living.

Elie with Pope Francis in Vatican City last March.

What’s more, this visit may be his only one. He is 78, and there will come a time when he will walk through the door Pope Benedict opened and go into retirement. The Jesuit James McCann, when he was rector of the Orientale, a pontifical institute in Rome, asked Francis if he would be willing to take part in the school’s centenary celebration, in 2017. “There’s going to be a different Pope by then,” Francis told him. During my recent stay in Rome, he said the same thing: “I have the feeling my pontificate will be brief: four or five years; I do not know, even two or three. Two have already passed.”

Nobody can know what Francis will be doing next year or the year after. Right now, though, he is the Pope, and he is who he is. See him while you can.

Paul Elie, a senior fellow in Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventig Bach. In 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Satanic Verses, Elie wrote about author Salman Rushdie and the controversy surrounding the novel. He has reported from the Vatican since 1998.